"But it's not FOR them!!!" The biggest military power in the world belongs to a christofascist nation overseen by a felon found guilty of 34 federal crimes and has greenlit a gestapo with more direct funding than the entire military of Canada for the purpose of ethnic cleansing. Let Hetero Jessica throw some biodegradable glitter at a municipal parade
At this point if anyone is trying to exclude anyone benignly pro-queer from a pro-queer space I'm just going to assume you're a fed or something idk like something something destabilize the movement from within or whatever
I am making a VERY big point of the Ally flag in all my pride stuff at work.
Feel awkward about people maybe thinking you’re queer but still want to clearly signal “queers are okay with me”? SURE. LOVE IT. HERE’S YOUR WEIRD FLAG.
Don’t fucking at me about allies right now, they are ALSO actually getting fucking killed over us. Take your puri-gay shitty tent somewhere else mine is great with people’s cishet friends and relatives showing up to have our backs.
(“but what if they -“ shitty behavior is shitty behavior I don’t care if you INVENTED queer sex, if you’re acting like a douche i’ll kick you out. wanna act decent and accept the premises of queer coexistence and freedom, cool, i’m not judging you for feeling ok with the gender title they gave you in the delivery room or being attracted to people with the other standard issue title, grab a pop).
Agreed, and also what the hell is is going to take for people to recognize that there are cishet queers? Intersex, asexual, and aromantic people are queer, it's exclusionary to be using cishet as a synonym for nonqueer.
Another important thing to remember is that people who are just accepting their own sexuality or gender may look exactly like a cishet person to you. People who have long accepted their own sexuality or gender may look exactly like a cishet person to you. Some queer people are not visibly queer.
I will happily make John Q Straightperson feel welcome at Pride if it ensures John Q JustOuttaCloset doesn't feel excluded.
i also think people forget that the reason it ws easy to make friends in primary school is everyone you meet is not only trapped in a location with you daily, but also is interested in everything because they are 6. when you stop being interested in learning things you stop being able to make friends. making a friend is a learning process basically exclusively
Every single friend I’ve made as an adult is because we were interested in at least two of the same things, and they were usually things we picked up in adulthood.
Hobbies are important. Fandom is important. Learning is important. Growing is important. Never stop.
okay, we managed to get through the “you can be gay and not have sex” part, and im feeling charitable and i wanna talk about the “do crime” part
so many responses of “its nice that you’re privileged enough to be able to steal from Target willy nilly!” and that’s not at all what this is about. like, yeah, shoplifting and loitering and graffiti and breaking the rules is, obviously, part of “do crime”. but they’re not parts you have to do.
would you help someone get an abortion where it was illegal?
would you help a trans friend get healthcare that had been criminalized?
would you shelter someone fleeing persecution, even if the law said not to?
would you help a gay couple stay together when the state decided their relationship was unlawful?
instead, would you report someone else for breaking the law? will you snitch on your hungry neighbors for stealing food? on your homeless neighbors for sleeping where they’re able?
would you break laws to protect someone you love? a community you love? yourself?
Treating the concept of breaking the law for survival as a "Privilege" thing is one of the most sheltered white baby takes ever produced by this sheltered white baby website
it's a mindset that speaks to the average Tumblr users understanding of politics, that is to say Politics As Aesthetic. it's a take that can only be formed by people who don't understand that crime is not something people do because they're a separate class of people, and that posts like this aren't talking about acting like a tourist in the same way people pretend to be poor.
people commit crimes largely because of material conditions. we aren't out here saying "do crime" because it's the latest trend and if you're caught and you're white it's okay you'll be fine anyway, we're saying "do crime" as a signifier of solidarity with people who are made criminal by the state, as OP stated above.
Yay, Furality is here! I don’t know how many people are coming here vs. to my music site since Furality doesn’t give me any dealer’s den click metrics or whatever, but welcome all the same.
I already posted a Furality-specific entry on the blogpuppet, but since this is what I consider my main website, I guess I’ll cover all my bases! So, here’s another little FAQ.
Who are you, exactly?
I’m fluffy. That has been my real-life nickname since 2003, well before I renamed my fursona to match (which happened sometime in 2004 or thereabouts).
Note that “fluffy” is the name I respond to! Sometimes people call me “Sockpuppet” but that’s my band, not my me. Also sometimes people call me “fluffy OwO” because I used to have θωθ in my VRChat username to make it unique. Also that’s not how it’s pronounced.
What species are you?
Me? I’m a human.
Now, my fursona is a critter! I have a song about it.
There’s vague and inconsistent lore about it. The short version is that it’s just a nondescript “generic furry” that takes on aspects I think of as cute.
Previously I had a few separate fursonas, most of whom were porcupines, and one was a grue.
Incidentally, I’m not a therian, but I get why people assume I am.
Okay so what is this website?
This site is pretty much a shrine to my ADHD.
Originally I registered the domain name as a joke (say it out loud if you don’t get it), then later I decided to use it to host one of my webcomics, and then later still I decided to just use it as my main website for everything else. So pretty much everything I do aside from music lives here now.
I don’t really post to much here aside from the blog most of the time, although I’ve been slowly working on rebuilding my shop section. Someday I’ll also get back to working on comics too. In particular, I really want to finish both Lewi and Unity (no relation to the game engine) someday. But I only have so much energy these days (due to some chronic health issues) and I like to focus primarily on music.
What else should I look at while I’m here?
Even though my “main thing” these days is making music, I still do a decent amount of software development. My current big projects:
Publ: the software that powers most of my websites (including this one); in need of some major rewriting, unfortunately
Bandcrash: an app to make it easier to encode, self-host, and sell music online
Canimus: a lightweight protocol for musicians to publish their music to the web with the hope of building a robust, self-hosted, fully-independent streaming network (and I hope to eventually build some client apps for it as well)
I’m also super into coffee which sometimes crosses over with other things.
I also have a billion hobbies that take varying amounts of time and energy. For a hot minute I was doing ceramics and I’m hopefully going to get back into it soon enough (if you came here because of the Furality charity auction and were interested in buying my espresso cups, hi, I see you!) and I also have a bunch of other things I need to get around to listing on my shop. The best way to get notified about those things is probably by followng me on ko-fi, although any new product releases will also appear in this site’s RSS feed.
Speaking of RSS feeds, you can also subscribe to just the categories that you care about, if you don’t want to see everything.
Where else can I find you?
The linkbar on the main page is probably a good starting point. Of all the things there, I’m most active on Mastodon. You can also feel free to join my Discord community which is typically pretty quiet but has some cool people in it.
And of course here’s my VRChat profile. Feel free to join my music group or get some plaid wallpaper for your nameplate.
comments
#furality
#VRChat
#furry
(via busybee)
In fort worth texas theres is this water installation I used to go to as a kid that is an uneven, 20+foot , constantly wet stair case with no guardrails or hand holds or really any safety features that decends into a churning and rushing water pit. It also has a kill count of 4 if you were wondering
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.
i think there is a phenomenon where sometimes a trans person will go “hmm. i am treated as a man when it is convenient for others, and a woman when it is convenient for others, and often as a freakish third thing excluded from the advantages of both. surely, because of the gender binary, the Other Type of trans person experiences the opposite: they reap the benefits of maleness and femaleness at once.” like babes no they can do it twice
Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.
I can't access the full paper, but their conclusion is right there in the abstract:
While transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable. Current evidence is mostly low certainty and has heterogenous quality but does not support theories of inherent athletic advantages for transgender women over cisgender.
Personally, I'd like to see if more games would also include it/its, neopronouns, any/all pronouns, and not only he/him, she/her and they/them as basic ones, while picking the main character/main avatar/main sona's pronouns. And no, I am not accusing the devs of being exorsexists, I just wish there were more diversity or variety chooses in these games.
this is exorsexism
you aren't accusing anyone of anything but i am, if you make a video game and you do not have the option to use literally any pronouns then you are being (unintentionally) exorsexist
I think this critique hinges heavily on if the game is voiced or not. If the game is not voiced, implementing a custom pronoun system is very little extra trouble on top of any changeable pronoun system. I've done it before. There's no excuse not to do it.
If the game is voiced... yeah in that case I think devs are excused for going for she/he/they, for the same reason that Commander Shepard is always referred to as "Shepard" instead of whatever first name you chose for them. There's just not really a reasonable way to do it otherwise.
(sincerely, an it/its user who also wishes that it was an option way more often)
As a Greek, in response to the current controversy about Matt Damon being cast as Odysseus, I'd just like to share that one of the moments that changed my brain chemistry as a kid was reading a novelized version of the Odyssey and coming across the following description of Odysseus when Circe sees him for the first time and thinks he's hot: "his hair curled like a clematis and his eyes were very brown".
So may I present my own casting choice for Odysseus:
"only a poor artisan blames his tools" is such bullshit, in almost every imaginable line of work the quality of the tools you have access to plays a massive role in the quality of the end product, sometimes in excess of the role played by individual skill! For example, some people have to code in javascript
My take on the bullet hell genre, written entirely in HTML 5 and using minimal assets. Made for the GAMES MADE QUICK??? FOUR jam.
comments
#games made quick
(via busybee)
An application to help musicians encode and distribute their music to various websites. Get it on itch.io, or get the source code.
comments
(via busybee)
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
